


Take My Hand (take my whole life, too)

by voidwaren



Category: Stardew Valley (Video Game)
Genre: Multi, Slow Burn, Strong Language, because even I'm not sure who the romantic interest will end up being, characters and romances will be added as they happen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-29
Updated: 2020-05-06
Packaged: 2021-02-28 04:53:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,272
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22768069
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/voidwaren/pseuds/voidwaren
Summary: Umbra Penhollow never been a failure at life, exactly, but you couldn't necessarily call him successful at much of anything, either. He had all the chances growing up to do more than waste away behind a desk in nameless despair—and yet, for a reason no one, not even he, could tell you in the end, he'd settled for less. And, eventually, that less caught up with him.So when his estranged late grandfather leaves him a rundown farm in a letter, Umbra, though unsure of how to leave behind the monotonous life he’s come to accept in favor of something that demanded more, finds he can’t refuse.Before the letter, Umbra had settled on a life he didn’t realize he could leave. After the letter, he found he was being given a chance to change a situation he thought he’d been shackled into. A chance to change his outcome—a chance to try at life again.He takes that chance, and then that chance takes him.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 3





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> Farmer Umbra started as a bit of a joke character I could use to mess around on a new file over at [StardustFarmer](https://stardustfarmer.tumblr.com) (that’s why he looks like _that_ ), but then I got attached. Now, he has his own story, and I’ve lost all control over him.
> 
> I don't know when I'll be updating this thing, as it takes the backest of back burners to my other fic I'm working on and I tend to only work on this when I can't make anything else work. That doesn't mean it'll never be updating, but it will be very sparingly. Also? The outline is massive, so not only will it be slow, it'll also be _huge_ by the time I'm done with it. Umbra has a lot of shit to do, and he needs a lot of time to do it.
> 
> However, it's Umbra's birthday, so in honor of that, I'm slapping up the prologue to his mess and seeing where it takes me. 
> 
> Thanks for checking the story out!

The bus was cold that early morning Umbra Penhollow had left Zuzu City. Cold enough that he couldn't sleep any of the early-morning endeavor he'd wrought upon himself away—cold enough, even, that each breath he took threatened to shatter his teeth like glass if he clenched them too hard. It kept him wired, though, kept him a painful kind of alert. And, as he fought to ignore the numbness spreading along his fingertips, Umbra thought, not for the first time since leaving the smog-filled jungle he’d called home, that he was an idiot for going along with a dead man’s wishes.

It had been a week, at most, since he’d sat at his desk, toiling over a spreadsheet that made him want to lie his head down and cease to exist, when his phone had pinged with a message from his mother to call her. What he’d first thought to be an emergency had turned out to be an ill-timed checkup from parents who had traveled the country with their child before leaving him to the dank throes of a mediocre office life while they flitted on forward with a level of intellect said child couldn’t hope to touch and just, well, didn't always quite understand the parameters of a basic, mundane office job in a basic, mundane life.

_Your father and I forgot your time zone again,_ she’d said in apology after he’d fled his seat to call her where his coworkers couldn’t listen in, a byproduct of too many shifting numbers in heads filled with stars and planets and life too stellar to ever be considered Earthen. It was just a checkup, she assured him. To see how he was doing. To make sure he was still alive out there, like he did anything more treacherous than waste away in front of a computer screen all day.

A checkup and, well, a question.

It was his late (dead—Umbra never understood why people skirted around the word, but he was _dead,_ and had been for years and years) grandfather’s birthday that day, and his mother had wanted to know if he’d opened _the letter._

The letter, of course, was a final dying wish from a grandfather Umbra had barely known, sealed up and stowed away until the day Umbra was old enough to understand it, then stuffed into a drawer when his mother had handed it over and told him, in no uncertain terms, that he was never to open it until he wanted to start again.

Not _unless,_ he distinctly remembered her saying. _Until._

Until he could no longer stand where he was, _who_ he was, and needed to throw it all away and start again.

Umbra had thought she was just being dramatic at the time, upset her son was going into a life of computers and numbers and crumbling drywall that had nothing to do with the universe outside the reaches of the world like his parents before him. He had been wrong, of course. About his job, about his life—and about the letter.

Umbra had been wrong about it all.

Umbra had opened the letter that night.

Umbra—was an _idiot._

He was an idiot for quitting a job he might have hated more than anything in the world but was comfortably stable in, packing up everything he thought he couldn’t live without into a suitcase he had to buy on the spot, being someone who never traveled after a lifetime of always being on the move, and breaking the lease on an apartment that leaked on occasion and had a slight mold problem, but had never been robbed in the six years he’d lived in it. All because of a letter, stuffed away in a drawer first in his house and then in his desk at work when he’d somehow accidentally brought it in and didn’t know what to do with it, suddenly read in a spur of the moment action that Umbra petulantly wished he could take back.

Umbra was an idiot, because he still hadn’t gotten off the goddamn bus and returned to the world he already knew. He was an idiot, because each time he tried to tell himself he needed to go back, the words from the letter flashed in his mind as if on a loop.

_Dear Umbra,_

_If you’re reading this, you must be in dire need of a change..._

_Fuck,_ Umbra thought as the world passed him by, the paper of the letter in his fist crunching pleasantly as his fingers tightened their hold on it. The single curse resonated throughout his skull like a death chime, ringing the omen of a doom he was willingly waltzing his way into with every moment that ticked on by. And, yet, even as he felt as if he were making one hell of a mistake, he still couldn't bring himself to get off that _goddamn bus_ before it was too late. Before he arrived in a place he knew, somewhere deep in his bones, that he would not be walking away from until—no, unless, this time it was _unless_ —he was done with it.

Something was calling him—and he didn't know how to stop listening.

_Fuck._


	2. Year 1, Spring [Part 1]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if you don't know Umbra from the Tumblr blog endeavor that birthed him, here's your obligatory notice that he's a whole entire ass of a being.
> 
> carry on.

The place was a shithole.

Unkempt and wild, with weeds growing from every inch of the property, including the beaten—no, the thing was _decrepit_ —shack of a house Umbra found himself in front of after making his way off the bus and locating what had to be the farm, visible as a short walk away in the opposite direction of what was obviously the town square. Umbra now stood in the waist-high grass and weeds—which was saying something of their unfailing growth, as he was no small man—and glowered at the structure he was fairly positive the townsfolk had simply left to rot with the death of his grandfather. And, Yoba above, _rot_ it did.

The wood of the tiny house was falling apart before his eyes, green springing forth from the boards that the miniscule porch was composed of, which also happened to sport a precarious, if small, hole on one side. The door itself looked ready to fall off hinges that, even from the distance he stood at, Umbra could tell were rusting away to a phantom of their former selves. The stairs looked dangerous. The roof was flaking tiles. The mailbox—actually, the mailbox looked fine. It was about the only thing on the whole property that did, aside from the strange wooden chest that sat just by the outer reaches of his land. Storage, probably. 

He had contacted someone by the name of Robin before he’d made his journey from the city, but, clearly, they hadn’t thought to warn him of what he was going to be arriving at. And, clearly, they didn’t care that he was going to have to live in _this_.

He only hoped there weren’t any wild animals around small enough to fit into the rotted holes, lest he wake up in the morning with something sharing his bed.

… If the thing even had a bed. Umbra didn’t think to question that when he’d called Robin, and now he wondered just what kind of joke, exactly, he was becoming the punchline of here.

Great.

“Hello?” a voice called, jarring Umbra away from his party of self-pity, and he turned to see a red-headed woman wading her way over to Umbra’s side. She hesitated momentarily, blinking, when he met her face-on, but then she broke into a grin. “My, you’re young! The hair threw me off.” She chose to punctuate the statement with a gesture of her own vivid hair, like Umbra wouldn’t know what she was talking about despite having spent the last near-decade of his life trying to cope with the idea of being— _very_ —prematurely gray. “I’m sorry I missed you at the bus stop! It came earlier than I expected. I see you had no trouble finding Lewis, though. I guess he wasn’t thrilled since he called me to get you and all.”

Umbra stared at her, the name Lewis ringing a bell as the name of someone his grandfather had known, mentioned in the letter, but otherwise not understanding what she meant.

Her smile wilted slightly when Umbra offered nothing in response, her eyes flickering towards the cabin, and then down to the grass surrounding them. She misunderstood his silent confusion for displeasure. “What’s the matter? Sure, it’s a bit overgrown, but there’s some good soil underneath that mess!” Taking a single step closer to Umbra, she gestured enthusiastically at the shell of a cabin like she was presenting Umbra with a new car he’d just won, and not something that was daring him to sleep in it that night and make it out alive. “... And here we are, your new home.” She paused, her lips parted as if readying to say something more about the mess the farm was left in, when her eyes darted to the cabin again. “Did Lewis bring you here and then leave you outside?” she asked, almost like an afterthought.

“I walked here,” Umbra decided to offer. She gave him a startled look, so he tacked on, “By myself. I don’t know where Lewis is.”

“I’m right here,” a new voice, one distictly age-worn and male, echoed from the house, and a man with graying hair beneath a brown pageboy cap appeared from behind the door, the hinges squeaking slightly with the movement. He stared at Umbra, an expression crossing his features that Umbra didn’t have a name for, before he broke out into a smile. “And you’re the new farmer.”

Umbra nodded his silent agreement, eyeing the man warily as he descended the stairs to meet them.

“Welcome,” the man, Lewis, said warmly, if not a bit too jovially for Umbra’s personal tastes, once he’d reached Umbra’s side at the bottom of the steps. The grass swayed around them, sticking itself into the buttons on Lewis’ pants, but Lewis ignored it. He watched Umbra, a strange look in his eyes, like he knew Umbra well despite never having met him. “I’m Lewis, Mayor of Pelican Town.” He hesitated a beat, and with that quick second he lost the spark of recognition in favor of a friendly detachment Umbra felt was more appropriate for the situation. “You know, everyone’s been asking about you.”

 _What?_ Umbra thought sharply. Had word gotten out that fast? How small was this place? He hadn’t bothered to look up anything about it before moving, too worried he’d lose his nerve if he looked too far into the small town he was leaving an entire city behind for.

His surprise must have been clear on his face, because both Robin and Lewis gave small laughs, and Lewis’ hand found a resting place on Umbra’s shoulder, much to Umbra’s chagrin. “It’s not every day that someone new moves in! It’s quite a big deal!” He turned, taking Umbra with the movement, and gestured at the house he’d come from, the smile still plastered across his face. Umbra fought the need to regain his balance on the old man, and somehow managed to keep his feet planted as Lewis continued on, “So, you’re moving into your grandfather’s old cottage. It’s a good house … very, er, _rustic_.”

 _Shitty_ , Umbra mentally corrected. _Unkempt. Dilapidated. You let the damn thing fall to shambles, and now you expect me to accept it and fix it back up again._

Umbra wanted to turn on his heel and get back on that bus, but Lewis’ fingers were firm in their hold, and Umbra found he couldn’t quite move to break it, never mind outright leave.

“Rustic?” Robin, apparently riding the same train of thought as Umbra was, snorted. “That’s one way to put it. _Crusty_ might be a little more apt, though.”

Lewis snapped his head in her direction, his eyes narrowed in a glare. “Rude,” he grumbled. His fingers dug deeper into the sinew of Umbra’s shoulder. Umbra wanted to reach up and swat the hand away. Still, something kept him from doing anything at all. “Don’t listen to her, Umbra. She’s just trying to make you unsatisfied so you buy one of her house upgrades.”

That would explain why she was letting Umbra live like this, and why she hasn’t told him about the state of the place when he’d called her from the city. Umbra fought the urge to throw her a petty, childish glare.

Robin muttered something in return to Lewis, but what, Umbra didn’t catch. Lewis didn’t wait for Umbra to say anything in return before he started up again, finally releasing Umbra’s shoulder and taking a step away.

“Anyway,” he said, the smile back on his face. “You must be tired from your long journey. You should go get some rest.” He clapped his hands together suddenly, nodding his head and taking a step away from both Umbra and Robin. Without missing a beat, Robin matched the step with a quick roll of her eyes. “Tomorrow you ought to explore the town a bit and introduce yourself.”

 _Tomorrow?_ Umbra repeated to himself, eyeing Lewis in confusion. Why couldn’t he today? It was barely past five, and there had to be at least an hour of daylight left. What did Lewis want him to do? Hole up in his house until tomorrow? Get lost on the surprisingly vast land of the farm?

Or, hell, leave? Did he want Umbra to _leave_? Was this his way of letting Umbra slip away without causing a scene?

Lewis’ smile softened. “The townspeople would appreciate that,” he said, nearly like he’d read Umbra’s mind.

He seemed, for a moment, like he wanted to say more, by the way his mouth hung slightly ajar beneath his moustache and his eyes stared at Umbra, that same disbelieving glaze to them that they’d had the first moment they’d caught sight of Umbra. But the moment passed, and Lewis’ expression dropped back into the easy smile he’d worn nearly the entire interaction. He turned to Robin, who was now standing by the wayside with her arms crossed. She raised an eyebrow.

“We should get going, let young Umbra get used to his new home,” Lewis said.

Robin’s gaze shifted to Umbra. Her expression was almost sad, but seemed to him like she understood something he did not. “Good luck, Umbra,” she offered, then turned to Lewis, and, together, they started to walk away. It wasn’t until Lewis threw him a final, strange look that it clicked.

They thought he was going to leave. Had they even wanted him to take the farm in the first place? Was that the true reason they hadn’t fixed anything up for him, hadn’t even told him the state of the farm before he’d arrived, and now was telling him to wait a day before meeting anyone else in the town?

“Well, fuck that,” Umbra muttered to himself, watching as Lewis and Robin disappeared up to the left by what he assumed was one of the different ways off of the farm, and then he turned and exited the property the way he’d come in.

* * *

He met a man named Pierre and his wife, Caroline, first, just as he was emerging onto the road that led to the town square. They were talking to one another outside of what Umbra later learned was their store—the town’s general store, different from a Joja Corp outlet, JojaMart, that was situated on the other side of town—and Umbra caught Caroline smacking her husband on his arm to direct his attention before they were both facing him and introducing themselves.

Umbra hardly got close enough before the woman had closed in, speaking for both herself and her husband while Pierre smiled from beside her. “And you must be Umbra,” she concluded cheerily before he could do so himself. “The new farmer, right?”

“You’ll have a lot of use of our store, then, I bet!” Pierre said, smacking his hand on the closed door of the building. “Feel free to bring by any produce you grow, I’ll buy whatever you’ve got. You’ll be pleased to know we’ve also got a stock of seeds to help you get to that point.” He grinned a grin worthy of the door-to-door salesmen Umbra always hated to encounter back in the city. “Perfect for a new farmer, huh?”

Something about Pierre’s jovial attitude didn’t sit quite right with Umbra, but he nodded all the same. He didn’t bother to mention he knew next to nothing about farming, never mind growing crops.

“You’ll find our daughter around here somewhere, I’m sure,” Caroline said. “She’s the one with purple hair, very hard to miss. I’m not sure where she’s gone off to right this second, but you’ll see her at some point. There aren’t much more than thirty people in this town, you should run into her sooner or later.” She shrugged a “what can you do” kind of shrug, and Umbra tried not to reel at the information he’d just been handed. _Thirty people?_ “If you’ll excuse us, though, we’ve got a date at the saloon.” She winked at Umbra, then wrapped her arm around her husband’s and tugged him away.

“Hope to see you in the store soon!” Pierre called back, and then they were gone.

Umbra waited until they were out of view before continuing his way down the worn bricks of the square, taking in the simple scenery around him, and didn't get very far before running into someone else.

The next person was standing under a tree next to a large house, leaning calmly against the bark and tossing a gridball into the air with one hand. He was relatively tall, filling out a green and yellow letterman jacket easily, and his perfectly-styled hair didn’t even sway with the movement from the ball when it skimmed just a little too close. He looked like a model posing for a magazine spread and, as he caught sight of Umbra and turned, the gridball falling easily into his waiting palm, everything about him screamed “I get by on my pretty face.”

“Oh, hey,” the guy greeted without standing up from his spot against the tree, and his voice was like something Umbra had only ever heard before in TV shows about attractive teenagers getting into trouble bigger than they were. It seemed almost fabricated. “You’re the new guy, huh?” He tilted his head, flashing white teeth. “I’m Alex.”

“ _Umbra_ ,” Umbra corrected at a mutter. His name wasn’t _New Guy_ , and he’d be damned if he allowed this guy to decide otherwise. “My name is Umbra.”

“Umbra,” the guy repeated, smiling in that way that reminded Umbra violently of high school, and the gridball danced along his fingertips in a distracting way Umbra couldn’t ignore. “Congratulations, you have the weirdest name in the whole town.”

 _Like that’s a feat,_ Umbra thought bitterly. The population was so small, Umbra wasn’t even sure it counted as a town anymore than a particularly busy truck stop did.

“Both my parents are astrobiologists,” Umbra explained, pushing his hair out of his eyes as something to keep him from staring at that damn ball. They had thought the name was funny—a pair of humans that studied the potential for life in space having a child named after something that early civilizations thought was an omen for the end of the world. It didn’t help anything that his last name was Penhollow, leading to a second pun of a joke he didn’t care much for. Umbra never got the point of their jokes, but he also never understood their obsession with the mechanics of life at its core. Aside from his faulty genetics and a last name that got him a lot of unfunny nicknames in middle school, Umbra hadn’t inherited all that much from them.

Silence met Umbra’s parental reveal, and he lifted his eyes again to find the reason why.

“They study outer space,” he continued slowly when he realized the guy’s expression was blank with a lack of understanding, deciding on the not-entirely-correct explanation for a subject he felt might be completely out of the guy’s ability to comprehend, and the blank look immediately lit up with understanding.

“Cool, Maru likes space, too. I never really get what she’s talking about when she goes on her rants, but she shows me the constellations and planets sometimes on her telescope. I bet you two could talk all about it—”

“I don’t like space,” Umbra deadpanned, cutting Gridball Guy off neatly. The ball stopped dancing, landing securely in the guy’s nimble hand. He frowned at Umbra, blinking his green eyes once, twice. It was surprisingly annoying, how that nearly-visible processing symbol didn’t do anything to mar his chiseled, golden-boy good looks.

“Oh,” the guy said flatly, like the declaration isn’t quite registering with him. Umbra took a moment to wonder how many steroids the kid was packing for there to be so few brain signals happening. Then, he caught Umbra off-guard by asking, “What _do_ you like?”

And Umbra was stumped. He liked many things, sure, but he knew that’s not what this guy was asking him. He’d grown up under the thumb of space and physics, and that was all he knew. He’d never really bothered to think about anything else. “I don’t know,” he replied honestly, after a moment of dumb silence.

The guy cocked his head, and the ball was in the air again, spinning like a top in orbit. “You should figure that out. Not much to life if you don’t know what makes you happy.”

And then he stood up from his tree and turned away to disappear into the house next to them, and Umbra was left to watch him leave and think, maybe, that the guy wasn’t quite as dumb as he seemed at first look.

* * *

He was given a moment of reprieve once gridball guy left Umbra to his own devices. The town was suddenly, suspiciously deserted despite the time being somewhere around six, if his ancient wristwatch was anything reliable to go by (and it usually wasn’t), and the air hummed with the sound of bugs coming alive for the night. He only just caught sight of a girl, once, the flash of bright blonde hair and a pink skirt disappearing around the corner of a far-off building, but, otherwise, the place was suddenly a ghost town.

Umbra used the desertion to find his way back to the general store, a feat in itself, because, while the store wasn’t very far from where Umbra had been over by the only trailer he could see, Umbra had no sense of direction, and he found the trailer twice before finding the store barely a two-minute walk away.

Not that he was upset by the discombobulation—it gave him a chance to try and better familiarize himself with the landmarks before he could become the town fool for his inability to know where he was going. And, the evening was nice. So much quieter than those loud city nights he’d endured for years, sirens blaring sharp and shattering through the thin walls of his apartment almost every night like demonic clockwork, and the weather mild and comfortable.

By the time he’d reached the general store’s darkened front door, Umbra was startled to realize he could get used to this. It was quiet, slow, and a surprisingly nice change from the loud, bustling world Zuzu City offered. No one bothered him here, it seemed like, and he could probably keep to himself if he stayed out of the townsfolk’s way, which seemed easy enough to do. It only took a moment for someone to walk onto the scene and burst Umbra’s fragile bubble by walking, nearly, right into him.

“Oh!” a voice, masculine, but not necessarily the deepest Umbra’s ever heard, said in surprise, and there were suddenly hands on Umbra’s shoulders to keep him from falling onto his face, which he was just about to do. “Ah, you’re new!”

Umbra stumbled away from the person, and the hands fell away the second it was clear he had his own footing again. A man with a shockingly appalling mustache beneath a pair of large glasses greeted Umbra when he turned to look at who he’d run into.

“I’m Harvey,” the man said, thrusting his hand forth. “I’m Pelican Town’s local doctor.”

Umbra frowned, slowly taking the hand. A town this small had a local doctor? Why? “Umbra,” he replied shortly. The man nodded once.

“The new farmer, right? Heard all about you. Didn’t realize today was the day you were coming in!” After a firm shake, he let go of Umbra’s hand, then seemed to hesitate like he’d realized something he hadn’t noticed before. And then, he moved in close. Very close.

What startled Umbra the most about the man was his size. Umbra was tall, to the point of being fairly used to being the tallest in the room by a handful of inches, but this man was nearly half a head taller than Umbra himself, and the feeling of being short was shockingly and entirely new to him. He’d always been tall, even as a child, and this was the first time he could easily say he was not compared to the company he was in.

Umbra was fairly certain he hated everything about it.

The behemoth of a man—Harley or Harvey or Hadley or whatever his name was—blinked twice, leaning in suddenly to encroach on Umbra’s personal space, his mouth popping open in obvious surprise beneath the atrocity that was his moustache as he peered into Umbra’s eyes.

“Your irises,” he half-whispered before cutting himself off abruptly and leaning in even closer as Umbra leaned away, and, right, _there_ is the awe. It was always awe or fear, or occasionally both. “Are your irises— _pink?”_

 _You have a woman with natural green hair living in your town and you pick_ my _eyes to moon over?_ Umbra grumbled in his head even as he nodded it once in affirmation.

“I have bad genetics,” he chose to vocalize over his rather rude remark, and was horrified when the statement came out at a whisper instead of the normal volume he’d intended. Hadley or Harley or Harvey blinked, startled, and finally leaned away again, his hands up in front of his chest, palms out.

“Sorry, sorry!” he said quickly, looking partially shocked at his actions and completely apologetic. “It’s a very small town. Newcomers with unusual traits are exciting for me. I lost track of my manners in my amazement there, I’m afraid.” He stopped suddenly, blinking again behind glasses that aged him severely in Umbra’s humble opinion, and his fingers curled loosely into his palms where he still stood with his hands still up in front of him. “You’re—quite young,” he finally added on, endlessly surprised over Umbra it seemed, and, ah. Umbra’s hair color seemed to have clicked with the rest of his picture.

Yeah, this small town was nothing new.

“Twenty-seven,” Umbra explained shortly, shoving his hands into the back pockets of his jeans. “Went gray young, ‘bout ten years ago now. You know” —he shrugged, more to keep from having to look at Harvey or Hadley or Harley than anything— “those bad genetics. Or something like that.”

“No hair loss, at least,” Hadley or Harvey or—fuck, Umbra was just going to call him The Doctor until he could remember, or be told again, what H-name belonged to him—offered without an ounce of mockery. His return to the clinical, but comforting, tone he’d spoken in before noticing Umbra’s eyes told Umbra where his mind had wandered back to, and he shoved away the sudden feeling of being under a microscope.

 _Had to get lucky somewhere,_ Umbra thought instead, and then decided to actually say, “Had to get lucky somewhere.”

The Doctor’s response to that was a sudden, nearly-startled bark of a laugh, and when Umbra met his eyes again the glimmer of excitement was far from gone.

“You’ll be good for this town,” The Doctor declared, bringing back the sense of unease that Umbra had managed to forget for the moment he was under scrutiny, and Umbra gritted his teeth together and looked away. “Oh— Emily!” The Doctor cried suddenly, wrenching Umbra’s attention back before he was ready to give it. “The new farmer is here!”

The Doctor started to beckon someone forward with his raised hand, and a woman with blue hair and bright eyes floated into view, a trash can with the lid haphazardly replaced as her backdrop. There were many people, it seemed, with strange attributes in the area, and Umbra briefly wondered that that said about Pelican Town itself.

“Hello, Harvey!” the woman greeted airly.

 _Harvey_ , Umbra reminded himself. _His name is Harvey. Jesus._

The woman turned. “And you! You’re a new face.”

“Emily, this is our new farmer, Umbra,” Harvey introduced. Emily didn’t offer her hand like so many others had, and Umbra didn’t bother initiating. Harvey turned slightly and continued, “Umbra, this is Emily.”

Emily cocked her head, her eyes drifting down his person just once before returning to his eyes. “There’s something special about you, isn’t there?” she said cryptically.

Both Umbra and Harvey stared at her, then Harvey’s eyes darted to Umbra and he cleared his throat. “Emily works at the bar here in town,” he offered.

Emily perked up with a smile. “That’s right, the Stardrop Saloon. Feel free to drop by sometime, Gus loves seeing people.”

“Gus owns the establishment,” Harvey explained. “It’s usually busiest on Fridays, isn’t it? Maybe that’s a good time to go, you can hit almost the whole town at once.”

Harvey smiled warmly at Umbra, and Umbra decided, right there, that he would try his damndest to never set foot in that place on Fridays at any given time. He was in no way a people person, and he was not about to change that for a town that he owned nothing to.

Harvey, unaware of Umbra’s internal declaration to do exactly the opposite of what he’d just recommended, turned his smile onto Emily, who returned it. “I shouldn’t keep you,” he told her. “I’ll see around, Emily. It was nice meeting you, Umbra,” Harvey said, turning again to Umbra, before raising his hand to them both and leaving the area.

They both watched him leave. If it weren’t for the fact there wasn’t anyone else there, Umbra would have thought Emily was addressing someone else when she said, so quietly he didn’t immediately realize she was talking to him, “You’re going to love it here in Pelican Town.”

He blinked over at her, more taken aback by the way she said it than what she said. She didn’t smile, but she had a glint in her eye when she tilted her head and shrugged a single shoulder in a motion Umbra couldn’t discern the meaning of.

Umbra watched her warily, suddenly unsure. “You seem confident of that,” he told her slowly, then nearly stumbled away when she leaned in, boosting herself up on her toes so her face was almost level with his from where he’d bent it down to look at her.

“There’s something here for you, Mr. Umbra,” she told him, her tone low and eerie. “Pelican Town is just another step in the direction of your destiny. Don’t forget that.”

And then, before Umbra could do anything at all, she turned in a whirl of blue hair and red fabric and glided her way back to the building she’d come from. It wasn’t until she was around the corner and gone from view that Umbra realized he’d stopped breathing and a hum had started up in his head, pulsing in time with his accelerated heartbeat. He took a stuttered breath, his hand clutching at the fabric of his shirt, and gulped loudly through the tension that crawled up his throat.

Without waiting for his heart, or the hum, to calm, he turned on his heel and loped his way out of the square and back to his new land.

* * *

He didn’t go right into his house upon reaching the ramshackle lodgings. The buzz in his head had eased by the time he’d found his way back to the soil, and his heart rate was starting to slow down, but he had no want to hole himself up in the building he’d be seeing a lot of as he went about trying to figure out a living situation that would definitely keep the rain out. Instead, he found himself a seat on the planks of his porch and ignored the way they creaked with his weight as he clambered down, his long legs dangling from the edge to tangle the long blades of the weeds into the shoelaces of his newly-bought boots.

He didn’t know what he’d wanted exactly when he’d finally opened the letter from his grandfather and found a new life laid out in front of him, but he wasn’t so sure _this_ was it.

Shit.

Umbra dropped his face into his hands and kept his palms pressed firmly as the world around him awoke for the night, bugs starting up a more tolerable kind of buzz and owls hooting in a far-off distance. He was surprised to find, after enough time had passed for his ass to start to go numb from the unyielding discomfort of the wooden porch, that it was a soothing sort of combination, the night noise that housed not a single goddamn ambulance siren. He’d never realized until right that moment, with its utter absence, just how much he hated it. He let the night ride out around him for as long as life would allow it.

Unfortunately, Umbra would learn that, in Pelican Town, nothing ever stayed quite as still as he would like, and his first night would be no exception to that.

The sudden, muffled sound of grass rustling didn’t quite catch Umbra’s attention like it might have on a night where being alive didn’t completely exhausted him, but the sharp curse and the subsequent sound of something meaty hitting the ground did, and Umbra found himself launching off of his porch to the dirt below and fiercely wishing he’d thought to buy a flashlight at the store that day before Pierre had left.

His eyes strained to see anything through the deep black of the lightless parts of the night, the glow from his old, yellowed house lamp doing little to penetrate the darkened land around it. He could tell the relative distance of the intruder by the racket they continued to make as they fought their way through the foliage, but he couldn’t see shit. Not until a shaggy-haired head burst from the tall grass, and Umbra was suddenly met with the pale moon face of a kid who couldn’t look more out of place on a farmstead if he tried.

“Oh,” the intruder said, seemingly just as surprised to find Umbra there as Umbra was him. He blinked his dark eyes blankly, then seemed to come alive with a start, spouting yet another curse, like his former attempts hadn’t been sin enough. “Oh—fuck—shit. Are you the farmer? Was that today?”

He patted his pockets for something, eyes darting from Umbra to his own hands and back again. An object fell from the large pocket of his hoodie, a small square package white enough to catch most of the dingy yellow-orange light Umbra’s shack lantern offered the night, and the kid hissed something under his breath and stooped low to pick it up again.

He winced on his way back up, black hair splayed across his face, like a bug had caught him during his ascent. “I guess since you’re a farmer you wouldn’t want—”

“Who _are_ you?” Umbra cut in, annoyed but mostly just wanting this guy to get to the point. He clearly wasn’t a threat, whoever he was, and the carton of cigarettes in his hand had basically told the story for him before Umbra had even bothered to butt in.

The kid—definite emo era, now that Umbra could see him clearly as he straightened up, all he was missing was the textbook eyeliner—cleared his throat, the high points of his cheeks tinging a yellow-washed rose of a color. “The only asshole who forgot today was the day you moved in,” he offered, his free hand hesitantly reaching out. “But most people around here call me Sebastian.”

Umbra stared down at the hand, only taking it once Sebastian started to pull it back again. He didn’t let it go even after they shook.

When he also didn’t say anything, it got awkward, but only for Sebastian, if his expression was anything to go by. Umbra didn’t care enough to let it on his end. “Uh— I’m Robin’s son?” he tried, the palm he still had pressed to Umbra’s started to twitch slightly.

Oh. Robin. Umbra knew Robin.

That meant he lived here—and that he most definitely wasn’t a threat. Umbra let the hand go again. Sebastian hurriedly tucked it into his hoodie pouch.

“Sorry, I wouldn’t have come if I’d known you were already here,” he said. “I usually come here to smoke a lot. Keeps my mom or Demetrius from bothering me about it.” He cleared his throat awkwardly, ducking his head. “Won’t lie, thought you were a ghost at first. You kind of” —Sebastian gestured at Umbra messily with both of his hastily-removed hands, disrupting his hoodie, his expression scrunched up with a description he was clearly struggling to convey— “er, _glow_ , with all that pale skin and hair against a black shirt. I’m all for the black wardrobe, obviously, but, man, you look like a floating head from afar.”

Umbra frowned. He wasn’t going to be winning any tanning salon awards this century, sure, and maybe he was capable of getting sunburnt from a particularly strong lamp, but a ghost? Were small town superstitions something he was going to have to get ready to deal with if he stayed?

“They’re real,” Sebastian said quickly, evidently catching wind of Umbra’s thought process. He held his hand out like he could protect himself from Umbra’s judgement of Pelican, an unlit cigarette perched delicately between the knuckles of his index and middle fingers. “In the mines—Marlon can tell you about them. You’ll see them sometimes outside, on rainy nights usually. They don’t last long.”

“You have mines in this town?”

“Behind my house, actually,” Sebastian explained. “They’re not just coal mines, we’re not that kind of town, but we get adventurers once in a while looking to go trekking around in them. My friend Abigail—uh, Pierre and Caroline’s daughter? Yeah—she’s kind of obsessed with them.” He stopped suddenly, blinking a few times, a line springing to life between his brows. “Don’t—tell her I told you. Her parents would flip if they found out. And I’m over here running my mouth, Jesus, what is wrong with me?”

 _He must try to be the quiet, brooding type,_ was Umbra’s conclusion when Sebastian looked decidedly annoyed with his own behavior.

He took a step back, like he was getting ready to turn and leave, and Umbra decided on something right then and there.

“You can stay,” he told Sebastian, shrugging. Sebastian looked at Umbra in plain surprise.

“I can? You don’t care if some guy wanders around your farm smoking at night?”

“As long as you don’t set the place on fire,” Umbra replied, turning away and making his way back up his porch steps, “I don’t really care what you do.”

Sebastian watched him, his face scrunched up like he wasn’t sure if Umbra was messing with him. “All right,” he said slowly. “Thanks.”

“Yeah,” Umbra replied shortly, and then absconded into his new house for the night.

* * *

He heard it first when he was getting ready for bed.

At first it sounded something like a bird—high, melodic, and echoed across a far distance that only a farmstead in the middle of nowhere would be able to create. He ignored the noise as one of many he’d already been hearing that night and continued getting ready for bed, swapping out his jeans and long-sleeved shirt for the same worn gray T-shirt and green-plaid pajama bottoms he’d been wearing for years. As a city boy, it didn’t occur to him that birds typically didn’t sing without the sun up.

The call continued intermittently as he undressed and dressed again, digging through his suitcase for his toothbrush and toothpaste, growing a little louder, and a little less bird-like each time it came, but still he ignored it. He was used to things like sirens and shouts and the cooing of hungry, nosy pigeons—strange bird song wasn’t so strange to him, he didn’t know what other birds were typically supposed to sound like.

It wasn’t until he was rinsing his mouth out with cold water from the minuscule sink nestled in the dark back of the small shack that was supposed to be considered a bathroom that he really _heard_ the call, and then he couldn't do anything _but_ hear it. Like a siren of another kind, the bird call had lengthened and warped to a stretch of a melody, faint and almost imperceptible, eerily otherworldly as his ears caught it and held it and _listened_ to it. It sounded like nothing he’d ever heard before, animal or not, and yet he could tell, something about the noise didn’t belong.

Something about it— _needed_ him. _Wanted_ him.

And, suddenly and sharply, Umbra realized _he_ wanted _it_.

Without thinking of his actions, Umbra dropped the wet toothbrush he’d been holding into the sink and lunged back into the main room of his cottage, throwing himself across it to the door and wrenching it open to greet the night. The outside light flickered violently in response, threatening to go out, before it returned to its yellow hum of existence like nothing ever had disrupted it.

The call had stopped.

Breathing heavily as if he’d done more than take the four steps needed to cross the entire floorspace of his living area, Umbra took a fifth step out into the night as the crickets started up their chatter. He wrenched his head this way and that, but found nothing but the inky darkness glaring back at him, the sky above a masterpiece of stars he had never bothered to learn all the names of.

A feeling of loss surged up Umbra’s throat and he stumbled back into his house with a hand wrapped around it, the short nails on his fingers pinching the flesh sharply.

What the hell had just happened?

Dropping his hand, Umbra shut the door abruptly and stalked back to his bed, wrenching the sheets back with more force than necessary and climbing in, ignoring the way the springs protested loudly against his weight. As he pulled the covers up to his chin, he felt it come to life inside him.

A fire had sparked into existence in his chest, and Umbra could feel a pull behind his heart that he couldn’t explain. Towards what, or who, he didn’t know— _couldn’t_ know—and, with a fear for things he couldn’t name or explain, he resolutely smothered it before turning out the light and surrendering himself to an uncharacteristically fitful sleep.


End file.
